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1901 points l2silver | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.414s | source

Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
1. brongondwana ◴[] No.35739718[source]
Back in 2001-ish, looking for a rental house with good public transport. Screen scraped the entire realestate.com.au database overnight, then fed the addresses into some mapping API that gave me coordinates, and caluclated the distance from those addresses to the addresses of Zone 1 train stations.

Also had descriptions, so wrote a simple regex based scorer that classified the descriptions by keywords that I valued. Spat out a hitlist of likely candidate houses to go inspect.

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Also wrote a basic wedding registry that allowed people to scan our list of things we wanted and say they had purchased them, or were interested and it gave a list of others who might want to go in on a group purchase. No privacy, but it was only sent to friends. Circa 2004.

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Finally, wrote a diary and calendar tool which took emails with very simply structured subjects and built a static website showing travels through Europe in 2002. Could email from any net cafe with any email address and it would update the travel diary, or a website with a calendar saying which city we were in and how we were traveling to the next one. Friends could elect to get immediate updates or a daily summary. Purely static built from cron and email archives. Worked like a charm.

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More recently, hmm... as treasurer for various choir things I've written a ton of little commandline tools which give very quick access to data and allow tracking who owes what and logging their payments into a database, and tools which generate email invoices and receipts.

Everything else is either opensource or work stuff. And I don't code so much these days either, though this week I started diving into Python to create tools that help keep data for our marketing team up-to-date without manually copying stuff around, and some maintenance work on code I wrote 15 years ago which is still running really nicely but needs some updates.